See https://alexbarry.net for projects I’m working on, and contact info.
Also check out github.com/alexbarry
My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.
I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.
I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.
Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.
This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).
This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.
But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).
I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.
edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?
What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.
I already basically get that half the time I boot into windows after an update. They say “let’s finish setting up your PC” and try to get you to pay for one drive, office, even game pass.
I’m so glad gaming on Linux has gotten to such a good state. I barely ever boot into windows now. (The “ad” on boot up is probably only once every few months, but that’s about as often as I boot into windows).
Message me on matrix in #alexgames:matrix.org if anyone wants to try playing a multiplayer game together :)
(I’m not actually very good at chess or go)
Is it fun if one person is an experienced gamer, and the other person is more casual? (And often complains that the other person is too good :( )
Thanks a lot! Usually I’m okay up until I reach near the end … spoiler-ish warning:
I was doing great up until psychic ships kept crashing. I’d arrange all my colonists in a circle around the ship, and usually they could kill the mechanoids pretty easily. But sometimes one or two of my colonists would die. I tried to keep going after that, but then another ship part crashed within what felt like a few days (maybe it was 7 days), then I lost a few more. I had barely recovered from the last one.
I may have tried to start building the ship too soon. I think I had assault rifles for several colonists, and marine armour for a few.
But anyway, for a psychic ship, are you supposed to attack it, run away, and kite them back to your well defended killbox-ish base? Maybe that was really my biggest mistake. I would have just left it way on the other side of the map, but the psychic drone was getting bad. And I think there was a fire or something too?
(end spoilers)
It’s also possible that I had tried to challenge myself and set the difficulty to the mid level, but forgot.
Oh, also I often find myself running out of components, and just barely making it to component manufacturing before I run out. I always buy them all from traders, and try to conserve them. But even with component manufacturing, it feels like it takes forever to make one, even if I have like ~15 colonists, where a few are dedicated crafters. Maybe I just need to stay in this stage for longer, until I can get assault rifles for everyone?
And I never really read much about strategies, I generally just like to figure it out myself, but I suck at trying new things.
I guess the main thing is that I love the part where you try to survive against natural disasters and have enough food, but I’ve never gotten too into the combat. Plus it felt like it was always pretty easy up until I got to the kinds of enemies that you encounter regularly at the end of the game.
Rimworld is probably one of my favourite games. I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested. This new expansion also seems really cool, I copied two points from the steam description that stood out to me (spoiler warning! Even the steam description has a spoiler warning before these. Hopefully most lemmy clients support spoiler tags):
spoiler warning
spoiler warning (I notice connect on Android doesn’t yet support spoiler tags)
spoiler warning
A psychically-invisible hunter of human souls screeches outside your walls, returning every night to capture a new victim. The proximity alarm goes off, but you can’t see the beast. Study samples of the creature to learn to detect it. Then, become the hunters and kill it where it lives.
A parasite has mind-controlled some of your colonists - but who? They pretend to be human as they work to infest others. Track evidence, imprison, interrogate, and medically test people to find out who is infested before it’s too late.
(end spoilers)
That being said, I’ve only played the base game so far, and I think I’ve always played on the difficulty that is just one above peaceful, and I found it really hard near the end. But I’ve never bothered with killboxes, and I keep my colony wealth high I guess, I like to hoard food, silver, and everything. I also build floors (some people skip them to keep their wealth low). Perhaps I should have added: raid strength depends on your colony wealth (I think).
Does anyone have any tips for actually reaching the end game event? (Please use spoiler tags! I know a bit about it, but I think many people like to be surprised. Put :::spoiler some text that shows before users expand your spoiler before and ::: at the end.)
You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))
I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.
Ah, the comparison to Epic helps me understand a bit… maybe. Are they simply worried about PS5 “winning” and Xbox disappearing? I don’t worry that Steam will ever disappear because of Epic and don’t care if they get games (in fact I have an epic account just to claim the free games, but I don’t really play them because they don’t support Linux). But if Steam did disappear in favour of Epic, I would be pissed. I wouldn’t care if there’s a merger or rebranding as long as Linux support and my existing library is maintained.
Even still… worst case, they buy a PS5, and get all the same games and more? A friend of mine switched from Xbox to PS and thought it was pretty good. I do prefer the Xbox thumbstick placement over PS5, though. I guess they’d also lose their Xbox friends/following/achievements/etc. Though surely it would, at worst, be merged into PS.
But still, even if you’re worried about this backfiring and Xbox disappearing… it seems worth the risk, to me. Presumably there are some good PS exclusives that could come to Xbox?
I’m really trying hard to figure out how this isn’t just fanboy whining and I’m coming up short. I’m interested in other ideas!
I couldn’t understand why this would be anything besides good news, but I guess they’re worried that the hardware won’t get as much focus?
(I’m out of the loop, I play PC games now and haven’t bought a console since the Xbox 360 back in… 2008 or so? I forget)
“It’s so easy to see Xbox is killing its hardware and putting a stake in the heart of it by doing this,” he said. “And there’s no going back… it’s dead.”
He later tweeted: “Xbox could have killed Game Pass, say buy our exclusives and focus on our hardware and that’s 100 percent the better idea [than to] SAY LETS KILL EXCLUSIVES AND put Halo on PS5. The outrage would be half of this and guess what you might be back to having a healthy business.”
It still seems like an over reaction to me. Exclusives have always seemed bad. I’m just glad games are getting released on PC, though I haven’t played many AAA games in a while.
Awesome, thanks for confirming my suspicion that air travel is too overpowered. I feel better about giving OpenTTD another try some time. It’s hard to find time where we’re both free and in the mood to learn a new game. Plus I much prefer just figuring something out myself over reading comprehensive guides (I don’t mind looking up specific things).
I’m also excited to look into mods!
A thousand times, yes. I love Factorio and want to get my partner into it, but she finds the logistics tedious and doesn’t like the gritty art style. We love Cities Skylines (the original, I haven’t tried this new one yet). There aren’t enough city builders (or games focused on building and without much combat) that have good multiplayer.
Does anyone have any recommendations for that? We loved Stardew Valley but I want something with more building. The multiplayer mod for Rimworld works pretty well. I considered vanilla Minecraft but it seems like the buildings don’t feel important enough without mods like FTB.
OpenTTD seems like it should be exactly what we want (also it’s free! And runs on weak hardware, and mobile), but maybe we were playing it wrong. Airports seem to give way too much easy money. And when we first played through we only made transportation for passengers, and I think we should have focused more on industry. I tried it again myself later and did better after focusing on industry, but it still seemed like airports were better money (and way easier).
Awesome, thanks for sharing this! I haven’t gotten into audiobooks yet, but it’s good to know that there are user friendly options out there.
Vaguely related: it’s also possible to listen to audio books through local libraries in some cases. I think the app is not as friendly, and does a lot to prevent you from getting DRM free mp3s, but at least there’s no charge.
Thanks, this is somewhat reassuring. Maybe some day I’ll try it. I used to like tinkering with things, but lately I haven’t had as much patience or free time.
Ah, I actually have bought a few music CDs a while ago, and they were actually fairly easy to rip myself. I can’t complain about that at all. If ripping DVDs was that easy then I would probably enthusiastically buy a few DVD boxsets. But I don’t really want to buy dedicated hardware just to read DVDs on my PC to do a cumbersome ripping process, and also probably lug that hardware (or the entire PC) to my TV now and then to watch a movie.
I’ve been interested in vinyl for a while, does it really sound better?
Ah, good point. I had briefly heard of this and was shocked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code
For anyone who hasn’t heard:
This is achieved by way of region-locked DVD players, which will play back only DVDs encoded to their region (plus those without any region code).
This definitely furthers the original post’s point. And he may have even mentioned it.
It’s infuriating that you can pay for something and then move, and lose your collection. This comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/488/
I’ve never been into tablets, are Surfaces as easy to install Linux on as a PC? Is there any bootloader unlocking or anything like on a phone, or is it more like secure boot on a PC?
I had installed Linux on an old Chromebook and it would always offer to wipe the hard drive on every boot, so now I’ve assumed that some hardware isn’t as Linux friendly as others. I think a lot has changed since I got my desktop and the last laptop that I installed Linux on.
And are the Linux touch screen interfaces any good? I tried a Fairphone that was running something Linux and the touch interface was lacking. (It was a great tiny laptop for using a terminal though).
And last random thought… I loved the 10” netbook form factor back in 2009 or so. I think tablets are a similar size, but the weight is in the “monitor” part, I preferred the bottom heavy laptop form factor. Are the Surfaces okay for that, or top heavy enough that they can fall over and can’t have the angle adjusted finely like a laptop?